Machine Learning, a part of the Artificial Intelligence, represented by Deep Learning, can be used for real-life problems, and utilized across all sectors of society, including dental medicine. Deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is an exponentially developing new area of dental research and has yielded extraordinary results in diagnosis and prediction in the field of dental pathology. Caries represents the most common orofacial disease, even in most industrialized countries in the world. Thus, dental diagnosis, prevention, and treatment are among the fastest- growing sectors of the medical industry. The aim was to review the available diagnostic methods and evaluate the possibilities of introducing into dental practice a Machine Learning model as a method for caries diagnosis on permanent teeth. To validate the clinical applicability of a CNN model, 78 intraoral photos of permanent teeth, were used. Teeth photos were collected using a smartphone camera, caries regions were marked, and examined for the training of the adopted CNN model and to assess its diagnostic capacity. The mean Intersection-over-Union metric was selected to indicate detection accuracy. The CNN model did not obtain a clinically acceptable caries detection performance level (mIoU = 0.25). According to the model performance against the annotation quality, it has proven the ability to leverage the potential for improvement and adoption of similar Artificial Intelligence technologies to diagnose caries and elevate the oral health field to a higher level.

Stella Sekulic is a dentist specialist by education and has completed her Ph.D. at the age of 30 years from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. As part of her doctoral studies, she researched oral and systemic health and the treatment needs of patients with dental problems, with the aim of clinical validation of the four-dimensional oral health model. She worked as a researcher at the University of Minnesota, USA and at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Currently works in the health care center at the National institute of Public Health in Slovenia. She is engaged in teaching and different projects researching the quality of life related to oral health, namely functional, painful, aesthetical, and psychosocial dimensions of the stomatognathic system.